But not really what’s going down is the engineering for price and sacrificing the performance. The old adage of “get an SSD, and it feels like new computer” are fast going away. Reason is the demand has increased to such an extent the older, higher performing designs just cost too much compared to what people are willing to pay. It’s a race to the bottom for larger single disk sizes at lower cost/GByte. And the speeds/throughputs keep going down.

I remember seeing speeds start around 200MByte/sec, and peak out at 500MBytes/sec right before the Samsung 840 Pro series took the awards for best SATA SSD. Things got real cloudy after that though. NVMe seemed to be a way forward, but even those devices are no guarantee of better performance (again, due to the cost cutting measures of designers at the fabrication plants for Flash memory). The TL;DR really is at the top of the article here, Intel’s newest product (Optane) is likely a next gen fix, at least as a secondary level storage cache between a slower spinning disk and the CPU. Hopefully sizes will increase (I remember having to eke by a 32GB SSD back in 2009!) and be useful to a wider range of applications and users.